Odyssey
by ICanStopAnytime
Summary: Sayid and Desmond learn they have more in common than they ever would have guessed. Drama, introspection, action, and hints of Shayid, Sadia, DesmondPenelope, and Daire.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

During his university days, Sayid had occasionally borrowed books from his roommate Essam. These volumes he had always treated with respect. Essam had possessed a certain reverence for his books, but this was not what inspired Sayid's caution. It was a matter of honor with him to return borrowed items in the precise condition in which they had been received. Sayid would not be able to do this with Desmond's sailboat.

Of course, Desmond had not appeared to care about his sailboat when Sayid had taken it; indeed, the man did not appear to care about much of anything. Nevertheless, Sayid regarded the task before him as an unpleasant one. He eyed the Scotsman where he sat just on the edge of the tide, his pants rolled up to his knees, his feet planted firmly on the hard, wet sand. The inexorable surf rolled in and drew back, covering Desmond's flesh and then deserting it again with equal indifference. Sayid sat down in the sand beside him.

The Iraqi wasn't quite sure how to word the matter. _I regret that your sailboat was stolen. _ Too casual? Yet the sailboat was, after all, a very small thing in comparison to the lives he had placed in jeopardy. Sayid decided that, before making his apologies for losing the man's property, he would offer him the book he had found. "I discovered this discarded in the jungle. Did you drop it? There is a letter inside that bears your name."

Desmond snatched _Our Mutual Friend _from his hands and looked at Sayid with suspicion. "Have you read it?"

"The book? No."

"The letter," Desmond clarified.

"Why would I?"

Desmond hastily flipped through the pages to verify the position of the letter and then slammed the book shut. He held it in one hand, which he let dangle between his legs. "Thanks, brother." He stared out at the ocean. "Have you ever read Homer? _The Odyssey_?"

"I was compelled to once."

"You remember Penelope?" Desmond asked. "Now _there _was a woman. Sitting faithfully at home, waiting year after year for her one true love to return, and in the meantime coming up with all sorts of clever ways to put off her suitors. Now there was the right thing to do."

"She had no moral obligation to wait that long, no reason to assume he was not dead."

Desmond's face broke into an indulgent, lopsided grin as he turned to look at Sayid. "Well, brother, you can only say that because you've never had a woman you wanted to wait for you. Or one you've waited for."

"You know nothing about me." Sayid hadn't meant to sound quite so acrid.

Desmond released a short, nervous laugh. "Well, then, I stand corrected. And do you hope she is somewhere sitting like regal Penelope, devising impossible feats in order to thwart her suitors?"

"I hope she is somewhere alive and happy."

Desmond ran his tongue across his teeth and snorted. "How very noble of you."

"I…I let go. I moved on."

Desmond was glancing off down the shore, in the direction of Claire, who was wading into the ocean while cradling and swaying Aaron. "Did you now?" he asked almost absently. "And how did you manage that?"

Sayid watched Desmond watching Claire. "I simply made the decision."

"Simply, brother?"

"I did not mean…No. It was not a simple decision. But it was necessary."

Claire now seemed to laugh and race back out of the water. A piece of seaweed, perhaps, had tickled her feet. Desmond was smiling at her squeamishness, and his eyes followed her as she made her way up the sand to her tent. When she was out of sight, he returned his attention to Sayid. "So you took the path of Odysseus, then? Found yourself a beautiful nymph?"

This time, Sayid forcefully controlled the edge in his voice. "It is not the same. I was not married."

"That jammy bastard got Penelope in the end," Desmond mumbled. "Even without staying faithful." Now his voice rose. "But imagine if Odysseus were out sailing the ocean, guarding his heart religiously the entire time, and she was at home picking out wedding invitations! What the hell kind of story would that be?"

"A sad one." _And _i_t might have been my own_, Sayid thought, _if I had chosen differently._

"Yeah," Desmond muttered, quietly now, seeming to recover himself. "Yeah, a sad one all right." He flung his hand dismissively in Sayid's direction. "Don't you have some kind of army to raise?"

"There are things I could be doing."

"Then go off and do them now, why don't you?"

Sayid rose wordlessly. He left the Scotsman sitting in the sand, looking out at the ocean, ignoring the water that was ignoring him. Sayid didn't even realize he had forgotten to mention the sailboat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Claire could have been a model for a new workout video, the way she was bouncing Aaron and stepping side to side in rhythmic fashion. Desmond couldn't help but laugh. "Hard to settle, is he?"

"A bit," Claire admitted, but her smile revealed that her motherly affection ultimately eclipsed her frustration.

In another life, Desmond might have expended a greater effort to flirt with her. She was a cute, friendly thing, and she certainly provided a refreshing break from all of the solemn jakes moving about and speaking in self-important, hushed tones to one another. But that eejit Charlie was always panting around her heels like an overzealous puppy, and Desmond wasn't planning to make the philandering Odysseus his model anyway. He'd play Penelope if he had to. Damn Sayid's insistence that there was no moral obligation to wait, no reason to sit at home knitting and preserving purity. What did the gun-toting Iraqi interrogator know? He likely didn't have a true romantic bone in his body.

_I will always wait for you._ That's what Pen's letter had said. _Always. _But she hadn't wanted to wait for him to reclaim his honor. Not for that. She'd probably set a date by now. And if he ever returned to her, he would return a disgraced man. He'd stayed intoxicated so he wouldn't have to think about his shattered reputation, but the bottles were running empty now, and the cold fact of his failure stared him in the face. He hadn't won the man's race. But maybe he could still grasp something. He could be loyal for once in his life, the way he hadn't been as a soldier. He could keep his honor intact in this one thing: he could wait for Pen.

"Hey!" Claire said, recalling him to the present moment. He shook the thoughts from his mind and made eye contact. Blonde hair and blue eyes were quite a cliché, he thought. There was nothing profound about that combination. But in that cliché, the eyes were never such a remarkable shade of blue, were they? "Sayid was looking for you."

"Right. He probably wants to explain why he came back on foot without my sailboat. Do you know where he is, then?"

Claire slid her arm more carefully around Aaron so she could support him one handed. With her free hand she motioned down the shore to Sayid's shaded workbench.

As Desmond approached, he saw Sayid sliding a rod into the barrel of a rifle and yanking it back out. The Iraqi removed a small white cloth, now blackened from its journey into the gun. He replaced it with a clean piece and again guided the rod expertly inside. He pumped it back and forth with smooth force inside the barrel, and when he swiftly pulled it out, the rod emitted a painful scraping sound. Desmond flinched. "That's worse than fingers on a chalkboard."

Sayid tossed the dirty cloth onto a growing pile on his workbench. He put down the rod and began to reassemble the parts of the gun. "How often did you clean these rifles when you were in the hatch?"

"You're supposed to clean guns?"

Sayid raised his eyes without raising his head. He didn't laugh at the joke. The Iraqi snapped the last piece into place. He checked the chamber, dry fired a few times, and then lay the rifle on the table.

Desmond raised his hand, which clasped _Our Mutual Friend. _He tossed the book on the pile of guns. "Why don't you read that? It's not my time to. It won't be for awhile yet." Sayid began disassembling another rifle. Desmond had heard rumors that one man had possession of all the guns and had been parceling them out, but that man had been captured. He wasn't sure how Sayid had recovered so many rifles; perhaps he had been told where they were, or perhaps he had found them. Either way, it looked like he was preparing war inventory. "You do read, don't you?"

"Yes, but not often fiction."

_That figures_, Desmond thought.

"Consider lending it to Sawyer after I have rescued him."

"So you're making another attempt, then? Back to the hostiles?" Desmond now rested a hand on Sayid's table and leaned against it. "There's not much point. They're all deserted. Always have been."

Sayid slammed down a buttstock a mere inch from Desmond's outstretched hand. The Scotsman tried to be nonchalant about it, but the doolally Iraqi had almost taken off a finger.

Sayid's teeth appeared to be tightly clenched when he spoke. "You might have mentioned that before I left."

Desmond drew his hand from the table. "And you might have asked more questions when I told you ignorance was bliss. But you didn't. You seemed rather sure of yourself and your plans, brother."

Desmond knew enough of remorse to recognize the expression when it flickered across Sayid's face, but that expression was soon eclipsed by a cloud of anger. "You are utterly indifferent," the Iraqi said. "You sit and you drink and talk with the women and wander around giving people books while our enemies plot our destruction. Do you have any idea what is at stake here? Do you know that three of us have been taken? Do you know how many of us have died?" Sayid stroked his bearded chin. Desmond thought that perhaps the man was attempting to calm himself. He seemed to regret his outburst. The hairs of his beard were coarse and growing long. Desmond wondered when Sayid had last bothered to shave.

"What do you want from me?" Desmond asked, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of resignation.

"What do you know about the decoy camp?"

"I saw it once when I left the hatch. I took a very long walk about. It felt deserted, like a stage set."

"Yes, precisely. But if even their decoys are that well constructed, they must have technology . They may even have a means of communicating with the outside world. Yet if that is so, why do they insist on living here and on keeping us here? For what purpose do they take our people?"

Desmond shrugged. "I don't know anymore than you do. But I do know that if we don't go on little heroic jaunts we don't end up captured, now do we? We can sit here and eat and drink and entertain the ladies. Or we can go out in the jungle and die." Desmond patted the book. "You've just gotten home. Stay on the beach awhile, brother. Take the time to read it. You're not going to find your friends. The powers that be are beyond our grasp. We're like ants who do best to stay in their hills and avoid the giant foot." He smiled slightly, flippantly, but it was a difficult expression to maintain while looking into Sayid's dull eyes. It was hard to bury the pain with levity, maybe even harder than burying it with anger. "And when you do read it, tell me if it's any good."

Desmond left the book on the table and left Sayid gazing into the distance.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The golden sands glistened in the afternoon sun, but Sayid wasn't looking at them. He was glancing at Desmond as Locke announced, "I think I know how to find Jack, Kate, and Sawyer."

What a time for Desmond to be smiling in the peculiar way. The man was idle. If not for their conversation about _The Odyssey_, Sayid would have thought Desmond had been a playboy in his former life. He certainly could have no idea what it was to live the life of a soldier, to discipline oneself daily, to press on past the fatigue, to run into the face of the fire. Sayid couldn't imagine why the drunken, frivolous Scotsman should be privy to these weighty matters; he wouldn't care about them anymore than he had cared about his sailboat.

Sayid had finally apologized to Desmond for the loss of the vessel, and the owner had merely shrugged. It wasn't because he was forgiving, Sayid thought. It was because he was apathetic. Desmond did not appear to be concerned about his own property and his own life, so what were the chances that he would care about the fate of the survivors? "May I ask why _he _is being included in the conversation?"

Desmond didn't seem affronted by Sayid's question, however. He replied with his usual flippancy. "Is that supposed to hurt my feelings?"

"Tell him what you told me," Locke directed Desmond.

"The computer in the hatch wasn't only for pushing the button. I'm pretty sure it could be used to communicate with other stations."

So _now _the Scotsman wanted to make a contribution towards recovering the prisoners of war? No more loitering about the beach and entertaining the ladies? Well, it was a convenient time to feign helpfulness, now that the computer was no longer of service. "This is fascinating. But you just told me the hatch exploded."

"One of them did," said Locke.

Sayid assumed that Locke wanted to establish negotiations, but he feared that the outcome would prove unfavorable. The survivors were already in the weaker position. Sayid had spoken, hyperbolically, of how the Others sought their destruction, but the truth was, he did not know their true object. No one did. That they wished the survivors harm seemed clear enough, but why, and for how long, and in what form—all was muddied. How did one negotiate with an enemy that refused to reveal its aim? And what could the survivors possibly offer the Others in return for their friends? At this point, any attempt at negotiation might appear little different than waving a white flag. On the other hand, if the survivors _could _communicate with the Others, if they could at least discern their enemies' motives, it might give them an advantage when they prepared to mount another offensive. "You want to try to communicate with the Others?"

"Yup," answered Locke.

Hurley and Charlie now approached the group. "No luck, dudes," Hurley announced. "We looked everywhere. Eko's gone." The past twenty-four hours had been tumultuous indeed. Eko had been pulled from the flames, and now he was missing.

"There's no trail," Charlie explained.

Sayid could feel the beginnings of a smile tugging at his lips when Hurley admitted, "Not that we, like, know what a trail looks like."

"When you pulled him out of the tent, did he say anything?" Locke asked.

"Nothing coherent," Charlie replied. "Just mumbling, 'My brother, my brother.'"

"Sayid," ordered Locke, "pack your gear. We're going to that computer."

Sayid was so accustomed to responding to commands that he rose without hesitation, but not without thought. He would follow Locke for the time being, but if they did manage to contact the Others, the interrogator would certainly want to have a say about the direction of the conversation.

The trek through the jungle was not a short one. Locke led the way, and two people Sayid knew only limitedly had accepted the open invitation to join the journey. Perhaps they had grown bored with the sparse amusements available on the beach and thought they were on a scavenger hunt.

Sayid and Desmond took up the tail. "You start that book yet, brother?"

"Unfortunately," replied Sayid, "I now have more important uses for my time." If only they _could _return to a time when he did not: to a time when Sawyer was free to spend the day lounging in the sun and flipping through books; when Jack and Kate could challenge one another to a round of golf; when Sayid himself could share his lunch with Shannon and brush the silky strands from her forehead. He could feel his throat constricting. He let out a masking cough.

"Got a cold there?" Desmond asked.

"Yes."

"So I hear you were a soldier."

Sayid was not in the mood for conversation. His life in the battlefield was not a subject for entertainment, and he wasn't sure why Desmond would be interested in it unless he was seeking a diversion. "Yes."

His curtness did not dissuade the Scotsman. "So was I."

Sayid stopped walking. He turned and looked at Desmond with disbelief. He blinked and asked, without quite realizing he asked, "You were?" Sayid feared he was losing his edge. He had of late been leaping too quickly to conclusions, trusting too much in his own abilities, failing to see the things that were right before his eyes. Part of him knew it was time to humble himself further, but part of him feared that if he admitted too much self-doubt, he would render himself ineffective, and then he could never repair the shame of allowing his friends to be captured.

"The Royal Scotts Regiment of Her Majesty's Armed Forces."

"Then there are two soldiers among us. At least. Perhaps there are others. Perhaps—"

Locke's voice drifted back to them: "Hello, Eko!" The priest had been found.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Eko hadn't given much of an explanation for his sudden disappearance, other than to put a knife to Locke's throat and order him never to speak his brother's name. It was remarkable to see what these people tolerated from one another. No one probed Eko about his vanishing act, not even Sayid. The Iraqi, Desmond thought, was not as tightly wound as he had at first appeared. The survivors had grown accustomed to the bizarre, and although they might not admit it, they had resigned themselves to the idiosyncrasies of the island as much as Desmond himself.

They were all a bunch of tubes when it came to understanding what was really going on. Why did Sayid think he could accomplish anything? And now, as they walked toward the hatch, Sayid was asking Desmond about his career as a soldier. The Scotsman wished he had never raised the subject. Why was the Iraqi questioning him? Surely Sayid didn't believe he was going to raise an army.

"Did you ever see battle?" Sayid walked without looking at the ground, but he never seemed to falter in his steps. It was a bit unnerving, the way those intense eyes kept watching him instead of the path.

Desmond had once been proud to serve in the senior line of the only Scottish regiment of the British Army infantry. He had been bookish as a boy, and rising to such a position of honor and masculine prowess had provided no small boost to his sense of self-worth. He had seen battle in his time, or at least a skirmish, but it hadn't gone quite as he had imagined in all of his boyish fantasies. He couldn't remember what had happened—a cloud still covered his memory of those moments—but he was _told _he had turned and fled. His commanding officer was a nephew of Widmore's, and Desmond had always doubted the man's version of events, but he had no grounds to protest, no recollections of his own to reference. He was dishonorably discharged for being just the coward Penn's father had said he was. And then he had raced around the world in a mad frenzy to prove that he could brave any challenge, but he hadn't proved a damn thing except that there was no escape from this boggin island where some unseen Prospero guided the winds. "No, never did."

"Nevertheless, you have been trained in the use of firearms. You know something, certainly, of warfare—"

Desmond was relieved that the Iraqi was interrupted once again. He didn't want to have this conversation. Hadn't Desmond made himself clear enough? There wasn't any point in attacking the Others. Sayid was plotting and planning as if he were living in the real world, where people's goals were largely discernable. There was no way of knowing what the Others wanted, what their connection to Dharma was, what the button had really been all about, or why they'd taken the little triumvert. Sayid might as well be wrestling with an angel who appeared senselessly in the night. Then again, Jacob had won that match, hadn't he? Even if the struggle had crippled him.

But the Others weren't in the business of rewarding valiant efforts. Who knew what business they were in, but they certainly didn't appear to be seeking a friendly exchange, and Desmond doubted it was worth the effort to communicate with them. But now the group was at the Pearl, and Locke was telling Sayid to take everyone down, and Sayid was responding like a subordinate, asking only, "And you?" before Locke wandered off to some nameless destination.

Well, that buxom hen Nikki seemed to know where Locke and the priest were going. She whispered to Paulo that Eko was looking for his brother's body in the plane. Yet rumors had a way of warping; for all Desmond knew, Locke and the priest were really looking to get blottered on the secret stash of alcohol that was also alleged to have been found in the plane.

She was something else, that Nikki. She might have been a model on the cover of one of those issues of _Maxim _Desmond's cellmate had always been reading. One of those girls straddling a chair, right above the hot green lettering of the headline, "27 Ways to Make Her Want It." Desmond chuckled to himself. It was always some number like that: 27, 48, 34, 72. Arbitrary. Like those numbers he had pushed day after day, week after week, month after month.

Yes, Nikki could have graced the cover of _Maxim_, unlike most of the women on the island, unlike, say…Claire. Not that Claire wasn't model material, but she would have been better suited for a casual clothing advertisement. Claire didn't make a man feel bothered—well, except maybe Charlie. No, Claire made a man feel…comfortable. And comfortable was something Desmond hadn't felt in a very long time. Disgraced, betrayed, out of sorts, out of place, out of time, restless…adrift. But never _comfortable_. He had tried to substitute complacency for comfort, but it hadn't helped. Complacency masked the pain like a bandage: it kept the unsightly injury from the public eye, but it didn't actually heal the wound. For a moment, Desmond wondered what a lasting, quiet contentment might be like, but soon enough Sayid was motioning him into the hatch.

It wasn't long before Locke rejoined them, and despite their previous frantic search for Eko, no one bothered to ask the hunter where the priest was this time. Sayid set to work on the wiring of the computers, and Desmond wondered for a moment if the Iraqi himself had ever seen battle before the island. Maybe he was really nothing more than a tech nerd flashing his dazzling but substanceless feathers like a peacock.

The DHARMA initiation film droned on in the background while Sayid fumbled about and announced the wiring was only one way. From the couch came Nikki's bubbly voice, "Hey, guys, what are these other TVs for?"

"Sorry?" asked Locke.

"All these TVs...this guy says that there's six stations. Uh, here, check it out." She rewound the orientation film and played it again. Nikki quoted the narrator, "Projects. More than one. So, maybe some of these TVs are connected to the other hatches."

"Well, I'm suddenly feeling very stupid," said Locke. No kidding. Desmond himself had said but a few hours ago that he was pretty sure the hatch computer could be used to communicate with other stations, so why wouldn't the TVs be linked as well? But now Locke was admiring Nikki liked she was some kind of girl genius. Even Sayid was observing her closely, but whether the Iraqi was genuinely impressed by her deduction, surprised to discover that she had any functioning brain cells, or merely noticing how tight her shirt was, Desmond could not tell.

Sayid turned his gaze away from the woman and said, "Perhaps I could patch in one of the other feeds. See if we can get another picture." While he tinkered with the wires, Paulo emerged from the bathroom and noted that the toilet still worked. Desmond was amused by the reaction he received: everyone looked at the man as though he had just committed some egregious faux pas. Desmond supposed it had been well understood that no one was subject to bodily functions on the island, and Paulo had shattered that precious illusion. The offender was forgotten, however, as Sayid's efforts paid off and a picture appeared.

"Wow! What is it?" Nikki whispered.

"That's a good question," Locke said, as though approving a star pupil. It was an obvious question, Desmond thought, and hardly worthy of accolades, but he supposed it was hard for the old man to resist offering a bit of condescending encouragement to a head-turning beauty like that.

"Hmmm. Those are computers!" said Paulo. "Great! That's what you're looking for. Now we can get out of here."

Considering his own facade of indifference, Desmond was surprised to find Paulo's words so irksome. It was something Desmond himself might have said. Except he wasn't saying it. Instead, Desmond was wondering why the glaikit had bothered to come along if he had no interest in the mission. These musings were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a startling image on the television screen. A man in a black eye patch stared back at the group while Nikki gasped.

"I guess he'll be expecting us," Locke said.

Desmond turned his eyes to the bald headed man who obviously intended for them to track down the stranger. What a bizarre time for Locke to be speaking with such quiet amusement. Everything rolled off that man like water off a duck's back.

Desmond was attempting to decide whether he would announce that this was the end of the road for him when the siren sounded.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

The siren reminded Sayid of the air raids during the war. The fear always came first, snapping its jaws about the heart so that it felt as if the organ had fled to the throat, but then the exhilarating rush of adrenaline followed, gushing down like a tidal wave from the mind and streaming out to each limb of the body, leaving every fiber of his being alert, tingling, and straining. Locke outstripped him only because the hunter was closer to the opening of the hatch.

Sayid shielded his eyes momentarily from the sunlight as he emerged from the dusky Dharma lair, but soon enough his feet were flying gracefully after Locke's. He sensed Desmond and the other survivors behind him; he quickly, consciously noted their positions, but then he just as quickly dismissed them as irrelevant as he was drawn forward into the jungle by the shrill call of the siren. In the distance, he heard also a great sound of crashing and thrashing, and then Locke's plaintiff cry of "Eko!"

Sayid burst through the clearing just in time to see the gray tendrils slowly retreating through the jungle, like the last lingering smoke in the silent aftermath of the stilled battlefield. He approached—one step, two steps, three steps—and then stopped as Locke turned Eko's fallen body upright, caught his whispered words, and closed the priest's vacant eyes.

Sayid did not feel the panic he had felt when he had turned Shannon's body in the rain: that almost overwhelming swell of emptiness, that iron door shutting out the future and leaving only a dull, empty echo of the present. But he felt his breath catch, and his teeth set, and his heart pitch the way it had the first time he had strained his head to see a fallen soldier on the battlefield beside him. After a time, those deaths had ceased to move him; it was not that he was callous, but there had been no time to waste mourning lost comrades while the bullets still cracked and whistled in the desert air. The deaths on the island, however, had been spaced days and not moments apart. There was, even in the midst of the turmoil, time to think, time to feel. Too much time.

Sayid took the last steps to Locke's side. He turned his mind away from the drained life and focused his thoughts exclusively on the task at hand, which was to discover if Eko had revealed, in his dying moment, anything that might pertain to the mystery that engulfed them all. "What did he say, John?"

Locke's eyes turned slowly toward Sayid's. They were serene, as usual. "He said, 'We're next'."

It looked to Sayid as if the priest had said more than two words. But before he could test Locke's first lie, the man spoke another.

"What happened to him?" an approaching Nikki asked.

"Must've been an animal," the hunter responded, but he looked calmly ahead, the way he always did when he was neither recalling nor contemplating information. If he had looked slightly to the side before speaking, Sayid might have believed him. "Maybe one of the bears."

"Are we gonna carry him back?" the woman asked. She sounded hesitant, perhaps a little scared, but hardly rattled. Either she was stronger than Sayid had guessed, or she was simply inured to suffering that did not affect her directly.

"No, we're going to bury him here."

Sayid grew tense in reaction to Locke's presumption. There had been no discussion, only command. He was about to ask, in a tone of cautionary challenge, "Are we?" when Desmond asked it.

"The people back at camp…" Locke explained to Desmond, "…There've just been a few too many funerals lately."

Sayid looked away. He tried to concentrate on Locke's lies and not on one particular funeral that had offered no real closure.

"Nobody needs to see him like this," Locke continued.

Perhaps, Sayid thought, but not for the reason Locke meant. Nobody _needed _to see Eko, not the way Sayid had needed to see Shannon, the way he had needed to grasp her rigid body one last time as he had carried her back to camp for a proper funeral, with attendants, with words, with farewells—with _notice_. Sayid now wondered if he had not dug the grave himself in a public place, if his silent grief had not been visible, if they would have hastily swept Shannon's body beneath the earth just as Locke now sought to hide Eko's. Would they have buried her memory entirely if he had not driven into the pitiless earth a wooden testament to its permanence and crowned that symbol with a necklace that had once graced her warm, breathing, chest?

Maybe if Ana had still lived, there would have been one voice to insist on something more public for Eko. But Sayid could not move himself to protest. There was truth in Locke's words as well. One more funeral would echo across the beach like one more nail hammered into the collective coffin. No one needed to hear _that _sound.

"I'll slip back to the beach and get a couple of shovels," Locke concluded.

Sayid drew his eyes back to John. There were shovels in the nearby Pearl station, and Locke knew it. "I'll come with you," he insisted.

"No," Locke protested, "I'll be back in an hour."

Sayid did not want to call his bluff in front of those tag-along spectators Nikki, Paulo, and Desmond. He did not desire an audience for this confrontation. So he said only, "It is not safe to go alone, John."

Locke eyed him warily. Clearly he knew what was coming, but he said only, "I appreciate your concern" before acquiescing to Sayid's company.

They walked silently through the jungle for a time before Sayid ventured to address the hunter's second lie. The first (Eko's words) and the third (their current destination) would have to wait. "So what killed Eko?" He felt the jungle litterings crunch beneath his feet as they came to a stop, but he did not see them. He needed to see Locke.

"Folks back at the beach call it The Monster. I don't really have a name for it." Locke glanced at him. Was it amusement or condescension that gleamed in the hunter's eyes? "You don't believe in monsters."

Did John really think he would be so foolish as to dismiss real evidence simply because it hinted at something extraordinary? "I believe in what I can see," Sayid replied. And _this _he could see: the fact that John had seen. "But obviously you have."

Locke nodded while he took a swig of water.

"So," prompted Sayid, "why don't you tell me what you think it is?" Locke, apparently, would not call it a monster, and perhaps he disparaged the "folks on the beach," those simple commoners, for doing so. But monster seemed a fairly fitting word for a formless thing that slew strong men in an instant.

"Might be what brought us here."

Where some saw indiscriminate, impersonal destruction, Locke seemed to see providence. Sayid didn't see either. He saw only what had to be done and what had to be asked. "So you believe that this monster decided Eko was supposed to die?"

Locke gave the same hopeful, irrational, incomplete, comfortless—but possibly true— explanation that the theologians always gave, the same explanation Sayid's father had given him when his mother lay on a bed rank with sickness, the same explanation the Iraqi had tried, but failed, to give himself for Shannon's death: "I believe Eko died for a reason. I just don't know what it is yet."

And now it was time to address the third untruth. "Is that why you lied? We're not headed back towards camp, are we, John?"

"Sure we are," Locke insisted, but he must have perceived the assurance was useless with Sayid. His smile spoke resignation. "We just need to take a little detour first."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

"So…uh…what? We supposed to sit around and twiddle our thumbs until they get back?" Paulo had his own thumbs draped through the belt loops of his pants. He was looking dumbly at Nikki, who had just rolled her eyes in exasperated response to his question.

Desmond didn't understand women who seemed to enjoy keeping around men who annoyed them. They couldn't be entertaining martyr complexes, because they weren't suffering real abuse. But they weren't satisfying some need to mother a man, either, because they were far more patronizing towards their boyfriends than they would ever be to a child. Yet even Claire, who appeared sensible enough, must have found some kind of pleasure in keeping Charlie in her pocket, despite all the times Desmond had seen the pup rankling her nerves. What was _her _story? Did Charlie save her life or something?

Desmond himself had never done anything to _annoy _Penn. He wasn't one of those lukewarm, nickel and dime types. Oh, no, he'd screwed up on a _grand _scale with her. He'd flushed his reputation down the toilet, and then when she had hinted she would take him anyway, he'd rejected her grace. But it was either hot or cold: those were the only two things worth being as a man. Penn hadn't understood that. She'd thought he was running from something, maybe even running from her. But he'd been running _for _her and _toward _honor. Why couldn't she appreciate that? If he had stayed, how long could she have contented herself with a shell of a man? He could not be true to her without being true to himself. It was like the cavalier poet had said, "I could not love thee, Dear, so much/ Loved I not Honour more."

Yet Paulo, tepid little boy though he was, had a point. What _were _they supposed to do with themselves? Maybe they could put together some makeshift shovels, get the hole started. Wait, weren't there shovels in the Pearl? Surely Dharma must have kept them in every station. On this island, you never knew when you might need to dig a grave. This wouldn't be Desmond's first. At least he'd had nothing whatsoever to do with this one, not even accidentally. "I'm going go see if there's any shovels back at the Pearl. "

"I'll come!" chimed Nikki. Paulo sighed and began to follow her dutifully. "You can stay here if you want," she said to him with an aggravated tilt of her head.

"What? By myself? In the middle of the jungle? With a dead man? Sounds like a party."

Desmond turned away wearily and listened to the couple's insipid bickering all the way back to the hatch. He discovered two shovels, and the three returned and began digging. That is, Nikki and Desmond dug. Paulo bemoaned the labor he wasn't assisting. They'd gotten a good start by the time Locke and Sayid returned, sans shovels. Locke was clutching only a thick stick scratched with Biblical references.

Sayid immediately relieved Nikki of her shovel, and Locke offered to take Desmond's, but the Scotsman preferred to keep digging. It was better than thinking about the corpse that lay a few feet away, better than thinking that it was only a matter of time before he himself lay insensible beneath the sheet, the last chapter closed on the book of a life not worth reading.

Desmond had learned about all sorts of men from the immortal pen of Charles Dickens: Scrooges turned from misers into munificent men; Pips drawn from poverty to prosperity; Nicklebeys liberating mistreated boys and rescuing ladies from evil designs; and, on the bad end, the ones who never even sought redemption--the villains, the cold hearted Miss Havishams, the hypocritical Pecksniffs. But he'd never read about a man such as himself: a man who, fallen and disgraced, sincerely yearned for reformation without obtaining it; a man running to something, running like one possessed, seeking, reaching, knocking and, despite it all, never finding, never grasping, never beholding the open door. Maybe there was such a man. Maybe he lodged in the pages of _Our Mutual Friend_.

"So when do you think you'll start that book I gave you?" Desmond glanced at Sayid across the growing grave.

Sayid rested, took a deep breath, and said, "Why is it essential to you that I read your little volume?"

"Dickens never wrote anything little, brother."

"_A Christmas Carol_," suggested Nikki from above the deepening pit.

"That was a short story," Desmond corrected her, "not a novel."

"I thought it was a novel," said Paulo.

"My point exactly," said Desmond. When it was clear he wasn't getting any further response from Sayid, he went back to digging. But after awhile, he prodded, "You might find it quite profound."

Sayid drove his shovel hard into the dirt. "If you have something to tell me, Desmond, please do not attempt to communicate it in metaphor. There is something in the book you wish me to know?"

Desmond shook his head. He tried not to laugh. It was actually rather entertaining to rile the Iraqi. Perhaps he could make a game of it. Ten points if he could inspire Sayid's eyes to flash in less than five words. "I've never read it."

_And he scores._

The shovel came out the dirt. Sayid came out of the grave. He put the implement in Locke's hand. "You dig with him," he said.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

It was a relief not to have to say anything. At Boone's funeral, Sayid had felt compelled to speak. No one had raised a voice for Shannon's brother, and she herself could not manage to. Sayid would not endure the thought of that body swallowed by the earth without comment. He knew the memory of silence would pain Shannon in the days to come; she would feel as though Boone's life had been regarded as nothing because he had died among strangers.

There had been that motivation, coupled with the acute sense that Shannon held him responsible for being unable to say goodbye. Sayid thought then, as he stood by the grave, that Shannon would not continue to look upon him with affection. She would think only of the fact that while her brother lay bleeding to death, Sayid had kept her away, stealing kisses for himself in the moonlight. The taste of him, he feared, had forever soured.

So he had spoken: for her, for what she had lost, and for what he had lost too. Yet Shannon had proven him wrong. In time, she had shown that she could both forgive and give. And after she had given herself, he could not even give her a proper farewell; the words had caught, and he had fled her grave.

Thank Allah he did not have to speak now. He'd had enough of eulogies. Locke gave the address. There were no awkward pauses at this funeral, no checked emotions, no uncomfortable spectators keeping their careful distance from the grieving. No one had tied his or her heart to this man. Eko had been respected, and he had been liked, but he had not been loved, not here. Who knew who had loved him, and when, or where. But now, there was only a contemplative bald man musing aloud about a priest with a stick. It was at once peaceful and peculiar. Sayid wasn't quite sure how to feel, so he tried not to feel at all.

"When the hatch exploded," Locke eulogized, "your prayer stick fell out of a tree right on top of me." Sayid glanced at Locke. Of course John would take that as a sign. "So Sayid and I went out to get it 'cause it didn't feel right to bury you without it."

That had been the grand secret Locke had felt the need to keep to himself, until Sayid had pried it from him. John, Sayid thought, hoarded every one of his plans, however minor, as though sharing it would somehow diminish its consequence. That was why it had been such a surprise to see him issue a general invitation to the Pearl. But Sayid now perceived that Locke had only been playing at inclusiveness. In the end, John would do what John thought best, and anyone who wished might trail after him—indeed, Locke would probably enjoy the company of disciples—but any who followed must not expect too much information.

Yet hadn't Sayid been just as secretive? He told himself that his silences were different: they had always been born of practical necessity, not of some need to inflate his self-importance. He had never attempted, like John, to appear profound; he had only struggled to fulfill delicate tasks aimed at the preservation of the community. Yet silence hadn't helped him to ensnare Michael, had it? It hadn't brought his ambush to fruition. It had resulted in nothing but the capture of his friends and the near death of a woman and her unborn child. He could deceive others, but how long could he continue to deceive himself? Yet how he could admit his impotence either? If he could not craft a scheme that would lead to the rescue of those he had betrayed, what worth remained within him?

Locke continued, "I'd like to think that you died for a reason, Mr. Eko."

Sayid wanted to think so, too. He wanted to think that every strand that had unraveled in the past two months had done so for a reason; that the threads weren't fraying into chaos, that there was some anchor of hope to keep them all from drifting beyond the dark horizon. But was it possible he had already pulled that anchor up? Had he mistaken it for a chain?

"Just hope it's not too long before we find out what the heck it might be."

Locke sounded so casual. He had seen the thing pound Eko to the ground; he had seen Death at play, and yet he could speak almost with…merriment. It was odd. John was odd. Desmond was odd. They were all odd. This island was odd. The hatches were odd. It was all…so…ridiculously…

Sayid shook the foreign daze from his mind. He could not be overcome by the surreal. He must approach events as if they were sensible, tangible. He must keep pressing on, whatever strange shape or shade the mist around him assumed. Anything less was surrender.

"Rest in peace, Mr. Eko. Thank you for helping me find my…"

Locke's sudden trail off scattered the fog that had fallen on Sayid's mind. He looked at the hunter, who was reading something on the stick. Locke appeared momentarily stunned, and then he drew his eyes upward.

Sayid followed his gaze and beheld nothing but the distant hills bespeckled with trees that swayed in a quiet, rhythmic dance beneath a simple, blue sky. It pained him that he could not see what Locke so clearly saw.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Desmond hadn't been present at Scott's funeral. He hadn't been at Boone's. He hadn't attended the burials of Shannon, or Libby, or Ana. But he had been the only one to watch the earth receive Kelvin, silently and without ceremony. He had felt sadness then, and fear of loneliness, and guilt. Was it strange that he did not feel even the slightest prickle of emotion now?

Was it because he had not known the priest whose great body now lay secreted in a shallow grave? Or was it because he had not known humanity in any form, for months on end, as he himself lived entombed within the hatch? Had some human part of him died in there, where he had lived not with flesh and blood but with words and pages? Those stories had fired his mind and manipulated his emotions, so that he thought he had experienced all the heights and depths of human feeling. But here was real humanity---not a fiction---but a real man beneath real dirt under a real sky. And yet he felt nothing in particular, except a grumbling in his stomach, which reminded him that they had not yet eaten.

"When the hatch exploded," Locke was saying, "your prayer stick fell out of a tree right on top of me. So Sayid and I went out to get it 'cause it didn't feel right to bury you without it."

So is that were the bampots had been off to? There was always some crazy trek with this crowd.

"I'd like to think that you died for a reason, Mr. Eko," Locke continued.

Yes, well, of course Eko had died for a reason. Desmond didn't doubt that, not even for a moment. All things happened for a reason. But what Locke didn't understand, and Desmond did, was that it doesn't necessarily follow that all things happen for a _good _reason.

"Just hope it's not too long before we find out what the heck it might be."

A naïve hope, Desmond thought. It was a far, far better thing never to discover the why. Desmond had learned the reasons for many things: the reason Penn never got his letters, the reason Kelvin could leave the hatch with a rip in his suit…

Reasons never brought peace. They just revealed to you how powerless you had been all along, all that time when you truly, falsely believed that what you were doing mattered to someone or something.

"Rest in peace, Mr. Eko. Thank you for helping me find my…"

Locke stopped short. He stared at that deformed Jesus stick like he had just gotten blottered and was admiring the beauty of an ordinary lamp. And then he looked up at—what? Desmond didn't know. There was nothing but clouds.

Desmond turned to Sayid. Maybe the Iraqi could see whatever it was the hunter thought he saw. But Sayid's eyes were searching, confused, and, Desmond thought, perhaps just a little bit damp.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

The five now stood a few feet from the covered grave as each looked from one to another. Sayid expected Locke to speak, to suggest some future course, and for the moment, still humbled in the wake of his own failed plans, he was more inclined to follow than to lead. Would they return to the beach and rest and regroup before heading on to the Pearl? Would they forget the strange, one-eyed man altogether, and decline to speak of him as they declined to speak of so many things? Would they mount another rescue attempt to recover their friends?

Sayid waited, but no one spoke. "Someone needs to tell Charlie," he said at last. A moment ago, he had thought there was no one to properly mourn the priest, no attached heart. Yet Charlie had been close to the man. The musician had seemed alive for the first time in weeks as he labored beside the priest to build the church, as if he had regained some lost childhood innocence. But then Eko had suddenly ceased the project, and Charlie had looked like a crestfallen little boy who has just been told by his father that the man does not have time to play with him, that there are more important adult things that need to be done, things the boy cannot possibly understand.

"And Hurley," added Desmond. "They'll both be waiting to see what happened to him."

Sayid nodded. 

"I'll go," volunteered the Scott, and without waiting for anyone's approval, he turned.

Sayid spoke from behind him. "No one should traverse this jungle alone. I will come with you."

Desmond shrugged and accepted the Iraqi's company, but as he walked he said, "You wander it alone often enough. Or do you want to die?"

Sayid fell in step to the left and slightly behind him. "Of course I want to live," he answered reflexively, but he did not examine his answer.

"And why is that, brother?"

"What else is there to do but survive?"

Desmond caught his eye and laughed. Sayid looked away, downward, and when he did, he noticed something protruding from Desmond's pocket, ready to slip to the ground. "You are about to lose that." He motioned to the object.

Desmond followed his gaze and recovered the nearly fallen photograph. He stopped silently for a moment in the midst of the tangled, green grasses and stared at the woman imprinted there. Sayid could not help but look at her himself and wonder.

People here rarely talked about their pasts. They knew one another in the strangest, most incomplete, way, and yet they relied on one another more than family. They had all had lives before the island, except, perhaps, for Sayid himself. He had been searching for a life. He had never expected to find it here—to find it and lose it at once. "Is she the one you wanted to wait for you?" he asked. The way the man looked at her…Sayid could not conceive of any other reason for the expression in his eyes. 

Desmond walked on without answering. Sayid followed. "Strange thing, brother," the Scotsman said, looking not at his path but at the picture. "I recovered this from the wreckage of that imploded hatch. Everything was in utter ruins, but this was completely intact. Strange thing." He shoved the photograph hurriedly in his pocket, as though he regretted speaking of it.

Sayid thought of his own photograph of Nadia, now buried somewhere in his backpack. He thought of how it was only slightly singed, only minutely torn, only partly curled. Everything else was cinder and ash in the ruins of Rousseau's, yet that photograph had somehow survived. It was almost as if the picture had been purposefully left for him to recover.

Sayid's footsteps slowed. He felt uncomfortable with the all-too-personal coincidence. He was nothing like this man. _Nothing._ How then did they have so much in common? "I am not needed," he said. "You can carry on safely alone. I will go back."

He didn't wait to see Desmond's reaction, but he felt the man's eyes on the back of his neck as he turned and walked away from the things neither of them wished to name.


	10. Chapter 10

**CHAPTER 10**

Desmond surveyed the beach. Now where had the bampots gone off to? He stumbled upon them at last in the act ransacking the contents of Sawyer's tent. Charlie was gazing at the cover of a newly discovered prize, though why he needed to bother with that when he had Claire to look at, Desmond could not fathom. "Charlie."

The musician dropped the stack of magazines like a guilty boy who has just been caught by his unsympathetic father.

"Oh, Desmond--"

Desmond feared that Charlie was about to launch into some kind of justification, which would imply that he thought Desmond cared one whit about what was going on. And of course Desmond didn't. The musician could steal from another man's tent; he could sit all day flipping through a stack of pornography for all the Scotsman cared.

Desmond didn't dislike Charlie, but he didn't understand the man either. He'd done everything he could to save the diddy from the lightening flash so that the man could continue ineptly courting Claire and playing with that wee bairn of hers, but he didn't know how Charlie could enjoy the presence and the smiles of the woman he loved and yet still manage to carry about him a slight peevishness, a mild discontent. If Desmond's own Penn were here, all the isolation of the island would melt away in a moment; its barren stretches of sand would be transformed into a fertile beauty; its monotonous fruit would seem a varied and scrumptious feast; even the sudden, unpredictable rains would fail to aggravate him; they would seem, instead, a refreshing and splendid change from the warmth of the day, a welcome whim of the sky.

At least, that was Desmond told himself. In his memories, where the shrine of Penelope collected no dust, there were no petty squabbles over how to squeeze the toothpaste; no irritations when he was asked, please, to remove his shirt from where it hung carelessly on the back of the kitchen chair ("After all, Dessie, how many additional seconds would it require to secure a hanger?"); no headaches on any night of the week; no boring functions to attend as an act of duty; no bothersome cats to trip over in the hallway.

"I need you to come with me," Desmond said directly. He didn't have time for the boyish embarrassment that was creeping across Charlie's countenance. There were weightier matters at hand, events that had dried up all of Desmond's flippancy. A man lay dead in the ground.

"You guys find Eko?" Hurley asked.

Desmond had volunteered to be the one to bring the pair back, but he hadn't volunteered to break the news. "Both of you."


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

For the first time in over seven years, Sayid had not thought of Nadia for weeks. Yet now, as he stood beside Locke in the clearing of the jungle where they awaited the return of Desmond, a sickening sensation of redoubled loss rose within him. Why had Desmond reminded him of the photograph he had recovered from the ruins?

Sayid had let Nadia go that day in prison; he had not followed; he had let her go alone into the harsh world so that he might spare his family. And he had let her go again in the fires of Rousseau's; he had let the flames consume his passion and his idolatry and his dreams, even while it failed to consume the photograph. The second time, he let her go to spare his sanity, the sanity Danielle had sold to buy a desperate hope that brought her only isolation. And then he had seized hold of something new, something tangible, something entirely unpredictable, something he swore beneath the angry torrents of a storming sky that he would never let go. And he hadn't let go. But she had been wrenched from him nonetheless.

He was grateful when Charlie trudged into the clearing, swinging his arms haphazardly at his side, his face contorted with annoyance at being forced to follow without explanation. Sayid was grateful to turn his thoughts to the present once again, where he need not think about what might have been but only about what must be done.

"What happened?" Charlie asked.

Sayid prepared himself to speak, relieved to have something to say. But Locke preempted him. "Eko is dead."

The laconic response irritated Sayid. Locke was once again aiming for profundity. He might have explained further, but instead he spoke enigmatically like a master who was prompting his disciple to ask further questions. Sayid would not wait for Charlie to humor the man. "We found his body in the jungle. We buried him yesterday." Yesterday? He realized the strangeness of the word. Charlie would have to wonder why they had not told a soul, why only Desmond had returned to camp, and what they had been doing loitering about the jungle all night. But none of that was Charlie's concern. "How did he die?" the musician asked.

"The island killed him," Locke intoned.

Sayid suppressed a heavy sigh. It is certain that misery loves company, but so too does annoyance. The Iraqi had never liked Charlie better than now, when the Englishman sputtered with exasperation, "What do you mean, 'the island killed him'?" And then Charlie's voice rose with his color as he repeated, "What do you mean, 'the island killed him'?"

"You know what it means," Locke said, finally abandoning the Socratic method in favor of a semi-direct answer. "With the doctor gone, the camp's on edge enough without people having to worry about what's out here in the jungle."

Sayid was no longer concerned with the exchange; instead, his attention was diverted to Desmond, whose eyes were darting rapidly to and fro like those of a disturbed animal. Locke continued to issue instructions, but Sayid did not hear them. He observed Desmond intently but unobtrusively from out of the corner of his eye. It was Hurley, however, who spoke first. "Dude, are you okay? Hey, guys…what's wrong with Desmond?"

The Scotsman began to fly through the jungle, again in animal-like agitation, a wolf answering some unheard cry. Sayid followed, and, when they reached the shore, he watched the man frantically disrobe before plunging into the ocean.

"What is he doing?" the Iraqi exclaimed in helpless bewilderment. For days events had been spiraling out of control, and he had been trying to wrest some small semblance of order from the wreckage. But now Desmond's wild strangeness had sent him reeling yet again. He watched as the Scotsman grabbed hold of something in the water and began to pull it towards shore. Claire. Instinctively, Sayid cast a sympathetic glance at Charlie and watched the man take off toward the incoming pair.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

Charlie kept hovering around, asking questions, pleading to help. Why couldn't he just step back? Just step back and let Desmond save Claire, let him do something useful and courageous for once in his life, let him save Claire to save Charlie. Desmond understood how impotent the Englishman must feel; every man wanted to be the hero. Hadn't Desmond wanted that? Wasn't that why he couldn't endure the thought of living in Penny's flat, of letting her pay for the photograph, of failing to win the approval of her father? Desmond understood Charlie, but he didn't have time for Charlie. He put his mouth again on Claire's.

"She's not breathing?!" By now, Charlie's voice should have been a dull hum somewhere deep in a vacuum. Desmond's entire concentration should have been on Claire, but the voice irritated him as much as the sharp squeal of a fork scraping slowly across a ceramic plate. There was genuine concern in that question and fear and desperation, but there was also accusation and jealousy and plaintiveness.

Desmond steadied his nerves and his mind. He began CPR. He couldn't remember the last time he had performed the act. On the battlefield? No. Not there. When he had been a lifeguard as a teenager? Perhaps. He couldn't remember the last time he had placed his hands on someone like this, pumping, and waiting, and…not even hoping, not really, because it hadn't been about Claire, had it? It had never been about Claire. He had only rescued Claire to spare Charlie, but Charlie was safe now, wasn't he? Charlie was nowhere near the ocean where Desmond had seen him swallowed by the waves. And yet Desmond pressed on, not routinely, not mechanically as he had thought he would, but frantically. Claire wasn't breathing.

This time, Desmond really did not hear Charlie. He did not hear the musician, half-worried and half-wounded, ask, "Do you want me to help you?"

Instead, the Scotsman kept working, kept trying, and found himself imploring, "Come on! Come on!"

When she coughed and spit, a wave of relief washed over his tightened frame. Desmond hadn't felt that kind of release since…He could not think when. There was no relief from the day to day fear that consumed him: the fear of permanent loss, of isolation, of loneliness. In a moment like this, however, in the tottering balance of life and death there was a precious instant of determination—one way or the other, there would be certitude; there would be finality: one way or another, there would be an end to all that excruciating hope. But when that wave of relief subsided, the other hope—the older hope, the clawing, grasping, suffocating hope—maintained its pitiless grip.

Desmond helped Claire to her feet. "Come on, you're alright then. Let's get you back to your tent."

And there was Charlie, hovering close, too close, exclaiming, "Charlie's here!" as though that was what Claire most needed. And maybe it was. Maybe Claire needed Charlie the way Desmond needed Penny. Maybe all she needed was to hear Charlie's voice, promising nearness, promising permanency. _I'm here. Charlie's here. _Desmond hated the thought, and he did not know why he hated it. Why couldn't he delight in the possibility of love and joy for others while still hoping for his own? It was sheer covetousness, to want to see the good torn down, to want others to suffer just as he had suffered. He pushed Charlie away. "Let's get her back to her tent," he insisted as he lifted Claire into his arms.

"Let me help!" the lover begged. "_I _got her. _I _got her! _I'll _take her!"

Yet Desmond would not relent in the face of Charlie's longing pleas. "It's going to be fine. I've got her, Charlie!"

And still the lover lapped at his heels, crying, "I'll take her…"

So Desmond walked faster, faster and father, bearing Claire's wait himself, holding her close to his chest to prevent Charlie from grasping, if only for a moment, what Desmond himself would never have, to be for Claire the hero he could never be for Penelope.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

How had the Scotsman known Claire was drowning? No cry had traveled into the jungle; Sayid would have heard it. He watched Charlie ask the question that rested heavily on his own mind: "Hey, how did you know?! Hey, how did you know she was drowning?" But the Englishman received even less of an answer than he had received from Locke.

Sayid heard Hurley answer, however, "I'll tell you how he knew. That guy sees the future, dude."

Hurley, Sayid thought, was not known for his solemnity or penetrating insight. It was quite likely the young man was only jesting. Nevertheless, the Iraqi waited until it was clear that Claire was safe and well tended to, and then he approached the big man and asked him to explain his incredible claim. Hurley told Sayid about the lightening. "I'm telling you, dude, he totally sees the future."

"You say this as if it were a matter of no great surprise."

Hurley's shoulders rose and fell in affable resignation. "Why would it be, really?"

Sayid moved his eyes ever so slightly in silent acquiescence. He felt the rare tug of a smile at the edge of his lips. The framework of their common experience was ludicrous, but, having accepted the framework, he must attempt to work logically within its preposterous confines. "How much of the future do you think he sees?"

"Anything having to do with Claire, I guess."

Sayid watched Desmond reluctantly depart from Claire's tent as Charlie possessively overtook the work of caring for her. He paced deliberately through the sand after the Scotsman and confronted him. "How did you know Claire was drowning?" he demanded.

"I heard her crying for help."

"You did not."

Desmond snorted, a short burst with protruding tongue. "I did too."

"No, you did not."

"What's next? Nanny nanny boo boo? This is a pointless conversation."

Desmond turned to walk away, but Sayid persisted. "Hurley says you see the future."

Desmond stopped and laughed again, nodding his head. "Yeah, sure. Of course, brother. Do I look like a psychic?"

Sayid's voice was humorless. "What does a psychic look like?"

Desmond began tripping through the sand, calling back, "You want answers. I'd just give you another puzzle."

Sayid thought to pursue the Scotsman, to demand more information, but he did not know if Desmond's unusual foresight into Claire's situation bore any connection to the other island mysteries, and the Others were his foremost concern. He must concentrate his energies on Locke. He must determine what the man thought he had seen on Eko's stick and in the sky. Prying information from the solemn hunter would be no less aggravating than wresting it from the frivolous Scot, but it might prove more profitable.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

Sayid's determination was more than a little annoying. It reminded Desmond that he had abandoned his own. As he sat now facing the ocean, with its soft, distant roar and its relentless rolling, he thought of his resolution to win that race around the world and of how throwing himself into the task—as Sayid was now obsessively throwing himself into any task he could find—had brought him a temporary peace and a necessary sense of purpose. At least, that was what Desmond had believed at the time. Yet in the end, his quest had only been a distraction, hadn't it? And its purpose had eluded him.

It had all made sense in the beginning: how leaving Penny and entering the race would ultimately mean establishing himself, restoring his honor, and, at long last, deserving her. What had seemed perfectly rational, however, had proved a futile frenzy, just like all of those letters he had written, line after line. He looked down at the photograph he held in his hands, a frozen frame that marked the instant just before the most decisive moment of his life. He wanted to tear that picture to shreds.

"She's beautiful."

Desmond drew in a quiet, surprised breath and forced himself to appear nonchalant. "Hi. Thanks," he answered reflexively as Claire sat down beside him. _Thanks. _As though it were a compliment to him that Penny was beautiful. As though she were still his to be proud of.

"What's her name?"

"Penny…" It sounded so familiar, so affectionate to his ears. But he'd renounced the right to pronounce her name that way. "Well, Penolope." He caught a glimpse of Claire from out of the corner of his eye, and he remembered the trauma she had just suffered. He marveled at her delicate strength. "How are you feeling?"

"Still a little shaken up," she admitted, although she had looked more concerned for him than for herself when she had happened upon him with that photograph. It was an unusual woman, he thought, who could take two steps away from the brink of death only to look at a man with gentle sympathy. "I mean, I go swimming almost every day, and the undertow just grabbed me. I mean...if... I mean if, if you hadn't..."

It didn't require a great deal of gray matter to deduce that Claire was shy. Yet if that were the case, why not thrust in with a simple, two word "thank you", murmured beneath the breath? Why build up to the expression? Was gratitude that embarrassing? Desmond supposed it was. Hadn't he been humiliated by everything Penelope had ever done for him? Hadn't that been why he had walked away, why he had set his mind on a single purpose, on a fantasy of saving the world? No wonder Peter could not stand to have Jesus wash his feet.

Charlie interrupted their conversation, seemingly castigating Claire for her neglect of Aaron, but really fumbling helplessly for reassurance and self-confidence. "Claire? I thought you were only going to be five minutes. Aaron's starving!"

Charlie did that a lot, Desmond thought; it seemed he was always telling Claire she had let the baby cry too long, that she had awakened him too soon, that she had bundled him too warmly. And Desmond wasn't even around them all that much. He didn't know why Claire tolerated it, really. He'd heard how she had once risked her life to plunge into the dark jungle in search of medicine for her child. Surely she could tell Charlie to quit his nippin.

But she didn't. "Yeah, um. Sorry….uh…." She turned back to Desmond only long enough, finally, to reach her point. "Well, anyway, I…I just wanted to say…thank you…thank you so much…for being there."

"It's…" And in that instant, Desmond realized what he had never guessed: that accepting gratitude could be as uncomfortable as feeling it. "It's my pleasure." He watched Claire rise gracefully to follow Charlie dutifully, and then he returned his attention to the damning photograph.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

Locke inserted the sharpened hunter's knife, tipped with a small piece of fish flesh, into his mouth. He slid it out to release the fish and winced almost indiscernibly.

"Perhaps," noted Sayid, as he sat on the other side of the cook fire, "it would be more effective if you removed the fish by hand before consuming it."

Locke squinted in the sunlight, one eye twinkling in the midst of the scar that demarked it. "Now that wouldn't look nearly as impressive, would it, Sayid?"

If someone had been close enough to the Iraqi, he might have heard a laugh. But Sayid's lips were closed, and he appeared far less amused than he was. It was nice to see that Locke was capable of self-deprecation. Sayid, in his anxiousness over current events, had forgotten that about John. As frustrating as Locke could sometimes be, Sayid liked the man. He respected Locke's courage, his initial provision for the camp, his quiet sense of confidence, his self-reliance. He liked the man, but he did not feel he could quite rely on him. They could manage to work together, and together they might accomplish something, but there was always the risk that, at the last minute, Locke might go his own way.

"So, John…" Sayid looked levelly at the hunter, "what did you see at Eko's grave, on the stick and in the sky?"

Sayid braced himself for an epigram or a riddle or a cryptic pronouncement. It came as a pleasant surprise when Locke lodged the blade of his knife upright in the sand, leaned back on his arms, and said, simply, "I had a vision of a compass bearing, due North. It's where the Others are. I'm certain of it."

Sayid struggled not to laugh. It was not right to laugh at a man who was expressing his faith in all seriousness. More than that, however, it was not wise to laugh at what, in the end, might prove perfectly true.

Sayid was not a man to be guided by spiritual whim: he believed what he could see, what he could test, what he could prove. Yet he was not a materialist either. He could not look at nature, at the beauty of its order, at the perfect, mathematical language that alone could begin to unravel the complexity of creation, and conclude that there was nothing beyond his earthly vision. There were even times—times of hardship, war, or grief—when he had found comfort in the rituals of his childhood religion. He accepted, in some unspoken way, that things could happen that appeared irrational on the surface, but which would in fact prove perfectly rational if only he possessed the power to decipher the hidden logic.

If John thought he had experienced a vision, perhaps he had. And if he had, perhaps the direction would be worth pursuing. This bit of information was the closest thing to intelligence Sayid had; there had been no other clue to the whereabouts of the enemy. The rational man, Sayid reasoned, was the one who adapted to circumstance. And the circumstances of the island were…unusual, to say the least. In the final analysis, the only way to prove or disprove Locke's vision was to test it. "I believe we should set out soon. Time is of the essence, yet in my last attempt at rescue, I found myself outmanned and…" This Sayid found more difficult to admit: "outwitted."

Locke blinked. Clearly he was surprised by Sayid's willingness to accept his word and head north. He stabbed another piece of fish from off his plate and extended the blade, point first, in Sayid's direction.

"You will not mind if I appear unimpressive and reject the knife itself?" Sayid asked before carefully sliding the fish from off the blade. It tasted bland, but for all he knew, it was truly succulent. For Sayid, these present days brought nothing to savor.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen**

It was late in the evening, and Desmond's hands worked the kindling. Striking the sticks required patience, diligence, and a dozen attempts, but always the fire sparked to life in the end. Thus, no single slide of the stick felt like a failure; instead, he knew that each seemingly fruitless gesture brought him one step closer to warmth. He had thought it would always be like that: that knowing the end would make the journey bearable. It hadn't.

"Beautiful evening."

It _was _a beautiful evening. The breeze was the best part, an invisible, perfectly soothing hand. But Charlie didn't sound like he really thought it was beautiful; he sounded like he was reciting some culturally required liturgy, hastily and with no thought to its meaning.

"Aye," Desmond answered. He noticed Hurley nudge the Englishman with his elbow.

"This morning…" Charlie began hesitantly. His hesitation, unlike Claire's, wasn't from shyness. Desmond could see that. Something quite different was tangling his tongue, something more like a battled-down resentment. "I'm sorry I wasn't more…grateful. Thank you for…helping Claire not drown."

"No harm done," Desmond answered dismissively. He didn't need Charlie's gratitude, even if he had gone out his way to save the man.

"Excellent. I brought a peace offering." Charlie reached into his backpack. Desmond heard the sloshing liquid before he saw the bottle; he received the sound like an animal trained to respond to a dinner bell. "You know, make the truce official," Charlie concluded.

Desmond fought back the urge that was welling up within him. He didn't want to give in to that siren call. He knew what had driven him to drink, but he wasn't quite sure what had made him want to sober up. "Thanks, but no," he answered. "I spent a wee bit too much time drunk as of late." _A wee bit._ Penny had always said he had a knack for understatement.

"Too good for us, brother?" Charlie asked. "Alright. That's fine. We'll take our drink…go somewhere else."

To Desmond, Charlie sounded like a peevish child threatening lack of friendship on the playground. What did he think, that Desmond would cave and grab the bottle, get pure bawsed just so they could be best pals? He was about to walk away when he noticed the label. "What kind of whisky is that?"

"It's…uh…" Charlie looked at the bottle. "It just says MacCutcheon." He held the label to the Scotsman's eyes, and a low laugh rumbled up through Desmond's throat.

_I'll be damned_, he thought. _MacCutcheon_. _The whisky I wasn't worthy to drink._ He wasn't worthy now, either, but there was no one here who could stop him from taking it.

Of course, there had been no one who could have stopped him from taking Penny, either, not even her father. She would have had him no matter what the old man said. Only Desmond had stopped Desmond from quenching that thirst. And why? Because it's hard to take a drink when you've been told you don't deserve it, even if you're parched, even if you're dying? Unmerited favor…he couldn't accept that then. Oh, no, it was so much easier to believe you could work to make yourself worthy. But now, now he cried, "Alright then! Let's have it!"

Charlie began to pull out some cups. "No," insisted Desmond, "the bottle, brother." If you were going to seize what you didn't deserve, there could be no half measures. You had to possess it whole; you had to take it deep down into your very core; you had to make yourself drunk on it. "I mean, if you've come to drink…let's drink!"

"Alright!" answered Charlie, with a wide smile, looking just a bit infected by Desmond's zeal, "let's drink!"

Charlie handed the bottle to Desmond, and the Scotsman sunk his teeth into the cork, the way he hadn't sunk his teeth into life. He yanked the bottle down and the cork was ejected with a loud pop. "Cheers!" he exclaimed.

"Cheers!" Charlie echoed.

And then a stream of the bitter, burning liquid went right down Desmond's throat in one long, furious, gulp. And the next thing he knew, the three of them were sitting by the fire singing. For a glorious moment there was no Penny, no walking away, no insane race, no world to save. That was, until Charlie said, "So…Desi. Let me ask you something."

"Anything, pal."

"How'd you know Claire was drowning?"

Desmond tried to explain it away by saying he heard her calling for help, but Hurley called his bluff in that understated, laughable way of his. "Well, no, you didn't. We were like a mile away."

Desmond tried to laugh it off, but then Charlie brought up the lightening too. So this was why they had tried to get him drunk. To wrest the truth from him. They were curious. _Well, we all know what curiosity did._ Desmond pulled himself up. Did these survivors, who had scrambled desperately for a time to escape from this island, who were still half-hoping for escape, did they really want to know he had chosen this fate? "Thanks for the drink, pal."

He began to stumble off, but Charlie shouted after him, "Hey, I don't know what you're doing. You best tell us. Oy! You think because you turn some key, that makes you a hero?"

Desmond had thought it would. He had thought if he just walked away from Penny, if he just walked away from the embarrassing grace she was holding out to him, he could earn her. But that hadn't happened. He was still Desmond. He was still lost. "I'm no hero, brother," he hissed.

"I don't know how you're doing what you are," Charlie goaded, "but I know a coward when I see one!"

Coward. That's what Penny had called him. A coward. A coward for not taking what he didn't deserve. How could that make him a coward? Hadn't he braved the earth, the sea, the sky, the rain, the cold, the heat—hadn't he braved every element on his race around the world? He had braved worse than that. He had braved death in that hatch. He had braved it all. But it was grace….it was grace he couldn't brave. Grace terrified him.

He felt the rage choke him, the impotence, the unworthiness. He threw himself at Charlie. He put his hands around the Englishman's throat and choked, choked hard, trying to choke the word out of him. _Coward. Coward. Coward. _He yelled something; he didn't know what he yelled.

And then he heard himself admitting it, what he could never admit before: "It doesn't matter what you do!" He screamed it, screamed it through the tears he was fighting down. "You can't change it! You can't change it no matter what you try to do!" You couldn't earn your way into that heaven, not with all the races in the world. You couldn't be a better man until you let that guard down, until you let that grace in, until you let yourself be humiliated by the truth of what you could never become on your own. "You just can't change it!"


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen**

Sayid sat quietly beside Locke while the man diligently sharpened a knife against a hand held stone. The hunter had a dozen ready blades, and he could not carry them all, but the Iraqi supposed the action made Locke feel purposeful. Having already agreed to use Locke's visionary compass bearing, they had recently been discussing the specifics of their plan to rescue of Jack, Sawyer, and Kate. However, they were having trouble coming to an agreement on a single course of action. John was simply not being rational.

The hunter believed they should plunge into the jungle, the pair of them, and blindly trudge north. While Sayid was reluctantly willing to take a chance on what was the only piece of information they possessed, he was not willing to be outmanned a second time. He believed they should recruit at least a few others before they mounted a search party.

"But who?" Locke now asked quietly, almost hypothetically, and Sayid was hard pressed to create a list of names. Their best and strongest and those most likely to hazard themselves were either captured or dead. Paulo was apathetic. Jin would not leave Sun anymore than Charlie would leave Claire. Bernard didn't have the stamina, and even if he had possessed the strength, he too was anchored by a woman. Now that was a chain by which Sayid was no longer bound, but it had been a delicious slavery, and this new freedom was an oppressive weight. Perhaps it _was _best that two men with nothing to lose make the trek alone. Yet they were not alone in their aloneness, were they? What did Desmond have to live for? A man who drowned himself in drink couldn't love life much, could he? Granted, the Scotsman had at first seemed too lackadaisical for such a quest, but his recent rescue of Claire had been valiant. Desmond had acted instinctively, effectively, and selflessly, and that did not even begin to take into account his peculiar, unexplained perceptiveness.

Sayid glanced across the shoreline now, in the distant direction of the Scotsman, and prepared to name his name. But then he saw Desmond throttle Charlie. Not that Sayid hadn't grabbed Charlie by the throat once himself, but that had been in response to a direct hit. Desmond seemed to be responding only to the influence of drink. That was one thing Sayid had never had to worry about in the Republican Guard – drunken soldiers. The more constant threat had been desertion.

Yet Desmond's was the lesser evil. He could envision the Scotsman being too drunk to get up in the morning for a battle, but he couldn't imagine him fleeing a fight once it was underway; he couldn't believe the man would leave a fellow soldier uncovered in the fray. Sayid couldn't even say that much for Locke; for all the man's seeming soberness, there was no telling when John might simply…wander off.

"Desmond" rose to Sayid's mind, but it lingered just behind the border of his lips and never quite formed in sound.

"Who?" Locke asked again, smiling with just a hint of self-satisfaction.

"Danielle," Sayid said at last. "She knows this island better than anyone."

Locke's eyes rose in an indulgent shrug and fell again to Sayid's level. "You dig her out of her hole then. I'll give you two days to recruit her and anyone else you want. But when the island speaks…I don't like to delay."

Now Sayid's eyes were the one to turn, but it was their shade that changed more than their direction: the glassy hue of an annoyed but controlled expression dulled their usual depths. However, he said only, "Very well," and then he returned his attention to the drinking party. Desmond was no longer attempting to choke the life out of the sprightly musician; instead, he was leaning on Charlie's shoulder as the man helped Desmond toward his tent. For a brief moment Sayid felt a faint longing for the comradery of his days in the Republican Guard, but then he recalled the blood that was spread like an inescapable web across them all.

Sayid turned his eyes away from the stumbling Scotsman and his laughing English companion, and he let them rest instead on the silent, contemplative hunter beside him. Locke nodded, thoughtfully, but unlike the little drinking party Sayid had watched dissipate beneath the stars, he and Locke seemed incapable of speaking about the things that did not matter, and so they did not speak at all. The silence fell like a curtain between them.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

The time had come to pitch a permanent tent. Desmond's circular voyage had taught him where his lot lay. Besides, he had a new mission now, didn't he? He had to settle down on the beach if he was going to keep Charlie alive, and keeping Charlie alive was the only thing that could keep Desmond going. At least he was of indisputable value to _someone_. And what other purpose did he have now? After all, he'd already turned the key and saved the world. Strange…he'd always thought saving something meant changing it. Yet the world didn't look any different, and Desmond didn't feel any different in it.

Desmond unraveled the tarp. That shade of blue was painfully artificial. It was a far deeper blue than, say, Claire's eyes—fuller, purer, and yet…not as real, not as warm. It would do for a roof.

"So when's it going to happen?"

Desmond turned to see the little Englishman behind him, squinting against the sun, his eyes like lizard slits. "When's what going to happen?"

"Don't play stupid with me, brother."

_Brother. _It irked Desmond, the way Charlie mimicked his own mannerisms back to him. It wasn't as if the Englishman didn't have a dozen annoying idiosyncrasies of his own. Maybe he didn't have a single tiresome phrase, but he had that accusing lilt to his voice and he had that half-faked smile. "I was drunk. You know, if I said anything…" _If. _Of course Desmond knew he had said something. He hadn't forgotten confessing his knowledge; he only wished he could turn back the clock. Once the truth was out, the responsibility became overwhelming. Isolation had seemed unbearable, but accountability was worse. It was one thing to believe you could work miracles; it was quite another to have people actually _expect _them of you.

"I have a right to know when I'm going to die!"

Desmond felt his tongue click against the roof of his mouth, but he didn't let the sound escape. _A right._ There were far too many people who didn't know the difference between a right, a privilege, and an impossibility. "It doesn't work like that."

"What doesn't work like that?"

Desmond was relieved that the approaching figure prevented him from answering. What was his name again? Sawyer? He had come back from the Others with that woman, Kate. She was a cute thing, but she seemed perpetually irritated. Then again, so did Sawyer, with that semi-permanent scowl that gave way only to smirks. They were a pretty pair.

"Hey! Oliver Twist! Where the hell's my stuff!"

Ah, but the man couldn't be all bad. He had just made a Dickens allusion after all.

"What stuff?" Charlie piped up defensively.

"Ah, you know good and damn well what stuff! I had books, food, porno, a bottle of scotch!"

Dickens and scotch. Now that was a man with taste. Desmond felt momentarily abashed for his hasty judgment. "Aye, uh…apologies for the scotch, mate."

"You drank it?!"

A man with taste, but not a forgiving man. "Well, to be fair, uh….there were three of us."

"Yeah, there were," Charlie echoed, as though that might appease the ruffled miser.

Sawyer leveled his gaze on Desmond. The way the man hoarded and demanded his possessions as though they were a shield or symbol of status reminded him of the men he had encountered in prison. He wondered if this one had, like him, spent a spell behind bars. "You, the Munchkin, and who else?"

Well, munchkin wasn't nearly as clever as Oliver Twist. Anyone, even a half-illiterate, could have culled that comparison. Perhaps Sawyer was less impressive than he had formerly appeared.

Desmond wondered why Charlie was smiling when he answered, "Hurley." Sawyer just grumbled and walked off.

"What's so funny, mate?"

"Hurley's the only one to ever take him on," the Englishman answered. "Tackled him to the ground once." He laughed lightly. "Well, except Sayid. He strapped him to a tree and tortured him."

Desmond's mouth dropped open slightly while Charlie shrugged with a toothy grin. Well, if Charlie didn't feel compelled to explain _that_, Desmond wasn't going to explain the visions.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen**

Sayid hadn't been on the beach when Kate returned, but he had encountered Sawyer on his way back to camp that afternoon, and their eyes had locked. Sawyer's were brimming with the resentment he somehow managed to keep repressed. The smoldering light rankled Sayid every time he saw it, even though he knew full well he had no right to expect anything but hatred from Sawyer. It was magnanimous enough that the man had never exacted his revenge for the torture. The Iraqi's victim had certainly had his opportunity, but he had walked away.

Sawyer was an arrogant, crude, two-bit thief, but he had possessed enough generosity to let vengeance slip through his fingers. How was that possible? In those early days, when Sayid looked at Sawyer, he was certain he was looking at a lesser man. Yet hadn't that redneck done what seemed impossible for Sayid himself to do? The desire for revenge was a constant hunger now; he did not understand how a man could ignore it, how it could be killed except with feeding. Though he tried to focus on a dozen things—on escape from the island, on the repair of shelters, on hunting, on exploration—always his mind returned to the one certain goal: he would find the man who called himself Henry Gale, and he would take his time in killing him.

As Sayid looked away from Sawyer's hate-filled eyes, he struggled to reassure himself that avenging himself on the so-called Henry Gale would be different from Sawyer seeking retribution on him. Sayid had tortured the stubborn southerner only to save Shannon. He had been wrong about Sawyer's knowledge of the medication. He had allowed personal dislike to impair his judgment. He had done what he had sworn he would never do again. Even so, that was nothing compared to what the would-be Henry Gale had done. _That _man had been responsible, even if only indirectly, for the death of the woman Sayid loved. He had been responsible for the kidnapping of innocent children and a pregnant woman. He had been responsible for Charlie's near death at the end of a noose and for the deaths of Ana and Libby. But worst of all, he was ultimately responsible for the terror of Sayid's people. It was because of _that _man that so many of the survivors lived, and ate, and slept, and woke in fear day after day, night after night, trying to live, trying to survive, trying to enjoy the everyday things, trying to press on, but never quite feeling safe. Sayid had no reason to feel any guilt for the beating, pursuit, or killing of _that _man. In this case, he told himself, his thirst for vengeance was a righteous longing. And now that Sawyer stood before him, he might be one step closer to satisfying it. "How did you escape?" he asked. "How did you manage—"

"Well, Aladdin, we summoned up a magic genie, of course." Sawyer's lip curled. Sarcasm could be used as wit, as affection, or as armor, and then there was the way Sawyer used it with Sayid, as a substitute weapon that struck where the southerner's own unexpected morality forbade him from striking with knives or guns or fists.

Sayid closed his lips tightly. He gave himself a moment to obtain calm. "Kate? Jack?"

"Freckles is back. They still have the doc."

"What did you learn? They took you into their camp? What did—"

"You know what I learned, Torquemada? I learned it's every man for himself." Sawyer pushed past the Iraqi and pressed on toward the jungle. 

Sayid thought better of following him. Surely he would have a greater chance of obtaining information from Kate. He hastened to the shore and found Locke walking with her. Approaching from behind he said, "It is good to have you safely returned. Did they hurt you?"

Kate stopped and turned. He thought perhaps he should move to hug her in greeting, but he felt suddenly awkward. It should have been a simple, natural greeting to extend to a friend who had been in peril and was now at home. It would, however, be the first time he had held a woman since Shannon's death. It would feel strange. He stood with his arms dangling heavily at his sides. Kate spared him the moment. "Hey, Sayid," she said, and kept walking. He noticed she didn't answer his question. Instead, she brought him up to date on what had occurred.

"Why did he say, 'Don't come back?'" Sayid now asked. Perhaps the doctor was willing to sacrifice himself for the safety of his peers; Sayid could believe that of Jack. Yet the Others were a continual threat; what could make more sense than discovering the base of that threat, eliminating it, and extracting the knowledge that might free them all from this island? Why would Jack want them to remain impotent on the beach?

Kate verified Sayid's first inclination, "He sacrificed himself so we could escape." Then she offered a muddled explanation of why Jack would want to keep them at bay when their best chance of permanent rescue rested with the Others: "Probably didn't want it to be for nothing."

Sayid would not accept the easy answer. "Hurley told us they released Michael and Walt." That meant there was a way out, and the way out wasn't on this beach. They might have to force the Others to free them, but Sayid was content to use whatever method was necessary to achieve that goal.

"Yep," Kate said. "They gave Michael a boat." Her voice had been thick with bitterness throughout the entire conversation, and now the angry edge grew even firmer. "He took off and never looked back."

It was clear Kate didn't want to be engaging in the exercise. She spoke as though Sayid was not worthy to be informed, as though the conversation was distasteful to her. Yet he must persist. They could achieve nothing if the individual survivors continued to hoard their own separate pieces of the puzzle. "Did you see any other boats?"

"No, but something tells me they didn't give away their only one." There was a note of sarcasm in her voice. Had she learned too much from Sawyer in that place?

"So they can leave the island?" Locke asked. Locke asked the question with forced calm. He did not ask it with the hope Sayid would have expected of another survivor.

"I don't know, John," Kate answered.

"The zoo where they held you," Sayid asked. "Is that where they lived?"

Kate told him about Karl, and about how the Others lived on this island. Why had Rousseau never discovered them? How well hidden must their camp be? How could Sayid hope to find it with nothing but Locke's dream compass bearing? And Sawyer had let the boy go? The only source of information, the only hope? "Why?!"

"You're going to have to ask Sawyer that," Kate replied, pacing away, fracturing the triumvirate down to two once again.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty**

The dream had come in the night. Or the flash, the vision, the déjà vu, the cycle you could shift but never shatter. It didn't matter what he called it. It was a weight, that's what it was: a great and heavy rock, and no matter how many times he rolled it up that hill, it would keep rolling back down. But it wouldn't crush him. It would crush Charlie. And then the blood would be on his hands. Death, Desmond thought, was easier than guilt.

This time, there was no lightening, no drowning Claire. There were birds; there were rocks. And there was blood. Lots of it.

In the morning Desmond rose and wandered the beach, but he didn't see the birds and the rocks that had flashed before his eyes. Charlie was beneath the ubiquitous blue tarp canopy of Claire's tent, cutting up a piece of fruit and laying them out on a washcloth in orderly rows while she held the baby. Desmond leaned against the pole of the tent. He was painfully conscious of his pose, and he made an immense effort to appear casual. "Good morning," Desmond said, nodding ever so slightly toward Claire, reflexively acknowledging the lady first, as he had been taught to do.

"Good morning," Charlie replied, a little too loudly, so that the sound seemed awkward and jealous in the quiet morning.

Desmond turned his eyes from Claire. He repositioned himself, deliberately, fearing he looked too stiff, too suspicious. He didn't think Claire suspected anything, certainly not that he was about to tell her boyfriend to be wary of his impending death. Desmond wasn't going to tell Charlie about the birds and the rocks, not just yet, not until he could locate the exact spot, but he was going to tell the musician to be careful and to stay close. He didn't want to frighten the young woman. Desmond encircled the poll with his hand. He scratched nervously at his half-bared chest. "Care for a walk?" he asked the musician. He hoped his voice hadn't hitched.

Claire's eyes widened as she looked from Desmond to Charlie, and a laugh briefly escaped her lips before she shut them tight.

"Uh…yeah…alright then," Charlie replied and followed Desmond down the beach.

"I thought it best not to seem obvious," Desmond said. He was looking at the surf as it rolled within a foot of their falling footsteps.

"So you thought you'd come off sounding like my lover, then?"

Charlie looked up at Desmond. The musician might have been squinting against the sun, or he might have been squinting in annoyance.

"Ah, right," Desmond said, considering the scene's appearance from Claire's perspective. "I guess that seemed strange, asking you for a walk. Look, I just need to give you a heads up, brother. Something's coming. I can't say what, but keep close."

Charlie ran a grasping hand through his mangy hair and then gripped it while groaning in exasperation. He pulled his fingers through. "Just come out and say it! What is it? How am I going to die this time?" 

"I can't say for sure at the moment."

"What the hell good are your flashes? I mean we could all die any moment anyway. But everyone else doesn't go around every second expecting it!" Charlie sighed heavily and dismissed Desmond with a wave of his hand. He tramped back towards Claire's tent. Desmond watched warily.


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter Twenty-One**

"Kate, where are you going?" Sayid's voice caused the woman to turn. Her stubbornness had once seemed a strength to him; lately, it was a liability. They were all headstrong, every last one of them, and he did not exclude himself from the analysis. That was well enough when they were traveling in the same direction, but too often it created an impasse, and one day, when they all wanted to go their separate ways, it might ignite an explosion.

"I don't care what Jack said." She sounded very much like his younger sister had when they were children and Sayid had told her she couldn't go out on the street without him, that their father had ordained he accompany her. "They've got him and we've got to get him back. I owe him that. So I'm going to get help."

"Help from who?" Locke asked.

_Whom_, Sayid thought. It was petty, irrelevant, and purely reflexive. He'd never quite overcome the severity of his English lessons, which began at home under the demanding tutelage of his father, who insisted that to achieve greatness in the military, he must study more than science. His father hadn't actually asked him if he _wanted _to achieve greatness in the military. He had simply assumed that all of Sayid's studies were a means to that end. That attitude should have equipped Sayid for life on the island. After all, that was the way everyone operated here—on unspoken assumptions, without consultation. "Kate," he demanded, "If you were looking for help to find Jack, why didn't you ask us?" The question wasn't born of curiosity. It was an accusation.

"Two reasons," Kate replied, spitting out her own accusation. "You don't know where to look and you're not motivated."

The muscles in Sayid's face tightened. The result was a controlled, half-blank look. As an interrogator, he'd grown accustomed to freezing his features before they could morph into a display of anger. You could never let on when a subject's refusal to answer questions enraged you; the rage had to come at the appropriate time, when it would have the appropriate affect, and when you were entirely its master.

"And I don't blame you," Kate continued. "Why would you want to go on another trek across the island, risk more lives, just to get Jack back?"

"You're wrong," Locke answered. His calmness at once awed and irritated Sayid. John didn't sound the least bit defensive, and he didn't seem to be making the least bit of effort to control his voice. Sayid too often had to muster all of his energy to order his emotions; he had to battle and strain himself to achieve the level of coolness Locke appeared to arrive at naturally. Was Locke's serenity the result of self-control or indifference, restraint or hubris?

"Oh, really?" Kate wasn't doing anything to control her emotions. She didn't have to. That was one freedom that came with being a woman. "Then why didn't you come after—"

"Not about the motivation," Locke interrupted. "Just about knowing where to look. We got a compass bearing. And I'm pretty sure if we follow it, it will lead us right to them."

"How?" 

"Because of the way the sunlight hit Mr. Eko's stick when John was burying him." As Sayid spoke these words, a sardonic smile crept into the corners of his mouth. It was easier to mock Locke than to grapple with the fact that Sayid himself had effectively submitted to the man's mysticism. It was the only way Sayid could follow and keep his distance at the same time. He hated that his reason had failed to find a solution to the capture of his fellow survivors. He envied Locke's confidence in his own plans, plans that rested on nothing tangible. Why, Sayid asked himself, was he accompanying Locke on this illogical quest? Once logic has become illogical, to what could one turn? Sayid would follow, but he would hold his skepticism tightly to his chest. He would voice it at regular intervals. It would be the shield that would protect his reputation if the gamble failed.

The sound of shots shattered his reverie. Sayid's gun was in his hand before he knew that he had reached for it.

"It's alright!" Kate yelled. "It's safe! We're just here to talk."

And with that assurance, Rousseau emerged cautiously from the shadows. So, Sayid thought, he and Kate were alike in more than their skepticism. They had both thought of Danielle.

"What are you doing here?" the disheveled woman asked. However much Danielle believed she longed for her daughter, however much she had threatened to trap Sayid to ease her loneliness, the truth was that she did not like to see her solitude disturbed. She no longer knew how to live in community. What would she do, Sayid wondered, if she ever did find Alex?

"I came to ask for your help," Kate said.

Only by telling Rousseau that she had seen her daughter could Kate convince the woman to accompany them. Having secured Danielle's help, they began their journey through the jungle. Sayid now took up the tail, glancing cautiously behind his shoulder from time to time. He looked towards Locke in the front and thought again of the visionary compass bearing. He momentarily regretted not having recruited Desmond to join them in the task. Even in the depths of his cups, the Scotsman made more sense than the hunter.


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

Desmond wasn't making sense of anything at the present moment. The flashes couldn't be easily deciphered; they had blinked rapidly through his mind and had left his head literally aching. He sat now just outside his shelter and winced as he massaged his grimy temple with long, callused fingers.

He had seen the birds again and the blood, the white contrasted sharply with the red, like the cross on the pure fabric that had sometimes draped the altar in the monastery. He had felt at home in that place, maybe for the first time in his life. But he had betrayed his family and failed his vocation. Nevertheless, his brother had dismissed him gently, directing him to some unknown, unseen calling.

If God really had plans for Desmond, why didn't He just reveal them? Strike him down on the road to Edinburgh or something, open the clouds with a great shaft of light, speak in an audible voice. Why all these half-hints, these faint ideas, these twisted, multiplying paths, all starting from the same point, all weaving different ways? Maybe Einstein was right. Maybe God didn't play dice. But He sure as hell seemed to play a thousand other games.

Desmond heard the sound of a throat clearing, not abrasively, but softly, a subtle note to capture his attention. He let his hand drop between his bent knees and looked upward. "Hello, Claire."

She smiled that way she did, halfway, hesitantly, as if someone might actually rebuke her simply for being pleasant. "I was just wondering," she said, her accent slowing her speech, giving Desmond time to notice her lips, "do you happen to have any alcohol?"

He blinked the sight aside. There was nothing unusual about Claire's beauty. She wasn't bold like Penelope. She didn't take charge of matters. She approached everything like a swimmer dipping a single toe into the water. Everything, that was, except threats to her child.

"Uh…why do you ask?"

"Aaron got a hold of a sharp shell in the sand and cut himself. With Jack gone…I thought I'd just put some alcohol on it, you know, make sure it was clean."

Desmond rose to his feet. Claire seemed startled by his speed, by the graceful way he pushed up and stood at rigid attention. He titled his head to look at the baby's hand, but he didn't dare touch the child; he hadn't washed since the previous evening. "Fresh out," he said. "We…drank it all." The baby wasn't even crying. The cut was minor. "Just wash it with fresh water. He'll be fine."

"I already have."

"Then—"

"What's going on?" Charlie's English lilt arrived from the left, and Claire turned.

"Nothing," she said. "I was just seeing if Desmond had any alcohol for a cut on Aaron's hand."

"Ah. Uh huh," said Charlie. "Why didn't you ask me first, then?"

Claire's bottom row of teeth, perfect and surprisingly white given the amount of time they'd spent without toothpaste, rested softly atop her bottom lip as she tried not to laugh. "I just thought Desmond, with the—"

"Because I'm the lush, Charlie." He touched Claire lightly on her shoulder. "He'll be fine," he reassured her, and then dropped his hand quickly in the wake of Charlie's gaze.

Desmond stepped back and turned on his heels. He began walking toward the distant rocks, the rocks that had been in his flashes. He had to discover what it all meant. He had to rescue Charlie from his fate. That was his purpose, after all, wasn't it? What else was he good for now? He'd already saved a world not worth saving, if it had ever really been in danger at all. This was his task now. This was the mission that would take his mind from the face in the photograph, the face he'd run from in order to run to something he couldn't even see, something that might not even exist.

He walked faster toward the rocks.

s


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

"We need to eat," Sayid announced, letting the strap of his backpack slide from his sinewy shoulder, catching it in the palm of his roughened, chocolate hand. The declaration was spoken with authority. It was the closest thing to a command he could issue in the company of people who would not be commanded, in the company of Locke, to whose lead he had too long submitted. Though he would not quite admit it to himself, Sayid felt a sense of satisfaction in seeing everyone immediately drop their gear to the ground.

Yet Locke had to remind him of his position as assistant. "Are we still on course?"

Sayid pulled the compass grudgingly from his pocket. Resentfully, he checked the bearing. Derisively, he said, "We are still heading North on a bearing of 3-0-5." And then, with that bitten-off smile that was the only lashing out he would permit himself, "Yes."

"I'm sensing a lack of confidence." There it was again, that quiet, condescending serenity.

"We've been walking for two days!" spat Sayid, not able to suppress the instinctive rise in his voice. "Following the compass bearing provided by the carvings on a stick!"

"And?"

_And? _Wasn't the absurdity obvious enough? Of course it was not, not to John Locke, prophet and seer, fount of all secret knowledge, Gnostic extraordinaire. "Do you _really _think we're just going to chance upon the Others?" There. The question was out, at last. He had followed this far, followed because there was no other path. Followed because as much as he failed to understand Locke's confidence, as much as he resented the hunter's self-certainty, it presented the only crutch he had to lean on. Yet how long could he continue to support himself with a staff he could not see? How did Locke _do _it?

"I don't know what we're going to chance on, Sayid," Locke said, admitting his lack of omnipotence, but nevertheless reminding the Iraqi, "but my bearing is the only bearing we've got."

Unable to deny the fact, Sayid shoved the compass abruptly into his pocket. "I'm going to find some fruit." He half turned. "And then, John, we are going to have a rational conversation regarding our next move."

The twigs of the trees snapped lightly as he tugged off the fruit. It was not a very satisfying sound, considering how forcefully he was plucking the produce. The innocuous destruction offered not even a temporary relief. He seized the next pieced of fruit and prepared to rip it from its root, but a sound checked him. His mind returned reflexively to the bustling marketplace of Cairo, to a time when so many delicious possibilities stretched before him, not just beneath the awnings of the vendors, but in the life that lay ahead, a life that could still lead anywhere, a life he never guessed would wind its warped way to the sunless torture chambers of Iraq. Sayid lifted his rifle and followed the strangely familiar tinning of the bell. He saw the cow, a common, cumbersome, domestic creature that seemed so very out of place on this darkly beautiful, exceptional, untamed island. That was when he heard the whistle.

Sayid, as slowly as the cow but ever so much more gracefully, sought out the source of the sound. From the veil of the foliage he peered out at a blue ranch house, and his eyes were drawn upward to the holy hope that sprung forth from its pinnacle: a satellite dish. He spied a horse, and watched as the cow was lead into a corral. For just a moment, the man who was leading the beast turned, and Sayid knew they had discovered the source of the mysterious transmission they had seen in the Pearl.


	24. Chapter 24

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

When Charlie ducked to a squat before him, Desmond dropped the cloth he was using to polish his rifle and looked up. "Afternoon there, brother," he murmured in greeting.

"So, mate, in these flashes of yours, you ever see me die with a ping pong ball in my eye?" Charlie, in dramatic fashion, cupped his eye with his hand, screamed, and fell backward in the sand.

Desmond chuckled. "No, brother, can't say I ever saw you meet your end in such a manner. Why do you ask?"

"Just wondered if I should watch the grand match, that's all." Charlie, with a lopsided smile, hopped up onto his feet. "You want to come and see for yourself? Sawyer's playing for his stash, and if he loses, no nicknames."

"No nicknames?" Desmond rose and slung his rifle over his shoulder. "But he hasn't had a chance to come up with many for me yet. I'd be a bit disappointed to lose such an honor. Nevertheless…I'll come."

He could feel a great smile beginning to burst out across his face. It felt good, to be a part of some kind of comradely again, a brotherhood he hadn't experienced since the monastery. Desmond had never thought of himself as a social creature; he liked to think of himself as cerebral: a reader, a thinker. But the truth was he never felt more alive than when he was in the presence of men and women who were thirsty for life. He slapped Charlie on the shoulder. "Let's see this match, then, why don't we?"

He was as exuberant as the rest of the crowd when Hurley scored his first point. It was good to have something to root for again, better than the football matches back home, which offered relief only from work and not from an almost daily threat of death. Yes, it was good to root for something again. It was good to have a simple goal. It was good, quite simply, to be alive.


	25. Chapter 25

**Chapter Twenty-Five**

In his military days, Sayid would have immediately reported his discovery to a superior. But here, where he was not forced to regard anyone as his superior, and where it had become second-nature for the survivors to keep secrets from one another, his inclination was to privately survey the house. This he did, circling it cautiously three times, determining every possible entrance and exit, and scrutinizing the surroundings. He felt no doubt that the building stood entirely alone, and he saw evidence of only the one inhabitant, although he could not rule out the possibility that others were inside.

It was the satellite dish that teased his spirit the most. If he could get a good sight on the man with the eye patch, he could simply kill him, enter the house, and then see if he could use the communications device. No doubt the man was an Other, and therefore an enemy. Shooting him would be no cause for remorse. On the other hand, if employing the satellite required the use of some sort of code, then Sayid would have dispensed with his only source of information.

These thoughts ran systematically through Sayid's mind as he made his way back to the clearing, where Locke, Kate, and Danielle still sat awaiting fruit. Sayid, however, was by this time empty handed. Danielle viewed his barren hands with annoyance. "I'll gather the fruit," she said, and began walking past him.

He placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her. "I've found something," he said. "Something quite interesting."

Soon enough, all four were surveying the house. Sayid asked Danielle if this was the radio tower she had mentioned, and she confessed to never having seen the house before. Sayid handed Kate his rifle and assured her that if he was unarmed, the inhabitant would not feel threatened. He did not tell Kate he already believed the man to be an Other. It was better to take things slowly and learn what he could. Then, in a vulnerable moment, after he had obtained the information he thought necessary, Sayid could attack. Kate might not approve of the plan. She might favor charging in armed and shooting.

Just as Sayid began to move forward, Danielle moved back. When Kate asked where she was going, the Frenchwoman shot Sayid a look of biting caution. "I have survived on the island precisely by avoiding these types of encounters." He could feel the judgment in her eyes boring into him; she might as well have said, "You are an incompetent fool, Sayid, a dreamer of dreams, and if you regard your life as dispensable, so do I." Instead she said, "I'll wait for you by the stream," and then, looking at Sayid directly, her voice dripping with a humorless brand of sarcasm, "for those of you who survive."

Sayid let her go without comment, and he persisted in his plan. Yes, perhaps it was foolish. He admitted as much to himself. But he would not become Danielle; he would not hide in the belly of the earth and go mad with idleness. As long as there was a glimmer of hope, he must strive to save not just Jack, but the beach camp as well. He had once been forced to read Robert Browning poems in his English classes at Cairo. They had bored him. Yet he recalled one such poem now, and one line in particular: "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" He was not grasping for heaven, just for earth—the earth as he knew it, the world outside this island, and with it, perhaps, the chance for a normal life.

As he walked toward the house with his hands raised, he spied a gray cat. It could have been the offspring of the cat Amira had stroked so many years ago as she sat courageously before him, withholding her tears, telling her story, and offering a forgiveness he did not deserve. He saw the cat, and in that instant he saw again the scarred arm, and above it the face of Amira, the face that was a hundred faces. It did not matter if he had confessed to a crime he had not committed, for he _had _committed it. Amira's deadened eyes were the eyes of every man he had ever tortured. Perhaps it was true that he had never touched a woman. The only woman he recalled being brought to him for questioning was Nadia. He had not touched Nadia, not once. But she had touched him.

At that moment, he felt the hot pull of lead within his shoulder, and then came the searing pain.


End file.
